For a brief period, Katey and I lived in Milton Keynes. The town centre was still being completed and everything was brand new. The churches were ecumenical centres fusing denominational difference into a pot of no especial fragrance. As we met people and conversed, we discovered many had moved there in an attempt to start again; a difficult divorce, the loss of a loved one, the need of a new job, or an individual with a sense that a new town must offer a new start.

Sadly, the new start was simply the obverse of a painful pattern that had been moulded into a variety of lives. Yet, the hope that we are able to outrun impending pain and avoid the disaster it threatens is common to us all. However, even the most accomplished surfer falls off the wave at some point.

It is impossible to outrun the harsh realities of life, and each of us faces up to both the external challenge and the internal conflict of anguish and anger at various points. This is not to say we are to travel through life head bowed for fear of what awaits us around the corner.

Quite the opposite: we are to seize the moment, and life, to the fullest extent we can, enjoying all there is to be found in each minute. I may have shed many tears as I navigated the valley of the shadow of death, yet there were fine sights to be admired and parties to celebrate even as time slowly ran out. The greatest thing of all is that while we cannot create new starts for ourselves, we await a new heaven and a new earth, as well as a new body, courtesy of God. The complexities of life in the earth can only confuse us and we are to life our head, look up and remind ourselves that this is current experience, real and requiring effective management, yet a future awaits us in which complexity falls away to reveal the substance of hope, Christ in glory, and we safely gathered in forever without tears, mourning or pain.

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